The Game (2014)

The Game is next-level entertainment, courtesy of smart scripts and a cast of finely drawn characters.

Brooding in tone yet laced with mordant wit and tinged with sinister inference, The Game keeps us wondering what the Russian sleepers' end game might be. Having seen only the first half of the series in advance, I can only say that unraveling that mystery is so far darkly compelling fun.

It's about characters and their slow unraveling along with the mystery at hand. Whithouse has assembled a superb cast of relative unknowns who support the main Hughes-Cox tandem and add layers (mother Hester, for example).

The Game is wonderfully atmospheric, stylish, and sexy. But it's a most un-Bond-like yarn. It is totally grounded in the reality of the era.

The first episode offers more than enough intrigue to hook fans of spy thrillers, even if some of the elements are eye-rollingly familiar.

Plenty of twisty plotting, grim atmosphere and MI5 staff with a rich variety of psychological afflictions, in six parts.

The Game struggles to stake out new territory for the genre, but it nonetheless emerges as an absorbing portrait of internecine squabbles during an ostensible Cold War thaw.